Kartik Athreya, senior economist for the Richmond Fed, has written a paper condemning economic bloggers as chronically stupid and a threat to public order.

Matters of economic policy should be reserved to a priesthood with the correct post-doctoral credentials, which would of course have excluded David Hume, Adam Smith, and arguably John Maynard Keynes (a mathematics graduate, with a tripos foray in moral sciences).

“Writers who have not taken a year of PhD coursework in a decent economics department (and passed their PhD qualifying exams), cannot meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy.”

Don’t you just love that throw-away line “decent”? Dr Athreya hails from the University of Iowa.

“The response of the untrained to the crisis has been startling. The real issue is that there is an extremely low likelihood that the speculations of the untrained, on a topic almost pathologically riddled by dynamic considerations and feedback effects, will offer anything new. Moreover, there is a substantial likelihood that it will instead offer something incoherent or misleading.”

So the Fed gurus, who have helped to completely floog the economy, are decreeing that we are too damn stupid to even begin to understand their brilliance.

In the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama today summoned a bipartisan group of over 20 senators to the White House to push for energy and climate change legislation.

But one thing the President did not want to talk about at the meeting was the BP disaster, a Republican source told ABC News. And that, the source said, led to a pointed exchange with GOP senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee.

RBS tells clients to prepare for ‘monster’ money-printing by the Federal Reserve
As recovery starts to stall in the US and Europe with echoes of mid-1931, bond experts are once again dusting off a speech by Ben Bernanke given eight years ago as a freshman governor at the Federal Reserve.

Entitled “Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here”, it is a warfare manual for defeating economic slumps by use of extreme monetary stimulus once interest rates have dropped to zero, and implicitly once governments have spent themselves to near bankruptcy.

The speech is best known for its irreverent one-liner: “The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

When US President Barack Obama stepped off his helicopter in Huntsville on Friday, the first thing he said was, “You’ve got a lot of golf courses here, don’t you?” Industry Minister Tony Clement told the National Post in an exclusive interview.

1. A BROAD AREA OF LOW PRESSURE IS CENTERED ABOUT 150 MILES
EAST-NORTHEAST OF CABO GRACIAS A DIOS ON THE HONDURAS-NICARAGUA BORDER. THIS SYSTEM HAS CHANGED LITTLE IN ORGANIZATION DURING THE PAST SEVERAL HOURS. HOWEVER…UPPER-LEVEL WINDS ARE GRADUALLY
BECOMING MORE CONDUCIVE FOR DEVELOPMENT AS THE LOW DRIFTS SLOWLY NORTHWESTWARD…AND THE SYSTEM COULD BECOME A TROPICAL DEPRESSION BEFORE IT REACHES THE YUCATAN PENINSULA IN A COUPLE OF DAYS. THERE
IS A HIGH CHANCE…60 PERCENT…OF THIS SYSTEM BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.

(CNN) — At least 12 people were killed and several others injured when they were run over by a train in a town south of Barcelona, Spain, a spokesman for Catalonia Emergency Center said Thursday.

At least 14 more were hurt, and three remained in critical condition, the spokesman said.

The accident occurred Wednesday between 11:30 p.m. and midnight local time as a group tried to cross the tracks after getting off a local train that had stopped at the town of Castelldefels, authorities said.

In case you had any doubt what Bloomberg thinks about the private sector’s ability to drive growth, here’s what he said about Obama’s growth program, the stimulus bill:

“I’ve never been a big believer of spending your ways out of problems. There is some argument for stimulus. I don’t know that you could make a good case — and there’ll be plenty of PhD theses written on whether the stimulus program that we’ve had has really made a difference, or whether it has caused more problems.”

Funny, he didn’t mention that a few weeks ago when he stood with Joe Biden to herald $30 million in stimulus money to fix the Brooklyn bridge.

The June 23, 2010 Ontario-Quebec border region earthquake occurred at 1:42 pm local (eastern) time about 60 km (38 miles) north of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’s capital city. The preliminary estimate of magnitude (M) is 5.0, at a depth of roughly 19 km (12 miles). These estimates may change as more data becomes available.

This earthquake occurred near the southern edge of the Western Quebec Seismic Zone. Earthquakes within this zone are mostly small. They tend to cluster in a wide area that is slightly elongated northwest-southeast. Historically, earthquakes in the Western Quebec Seismic Zone have caused damage roughly once a decade. Three or four smaller events each year are felt in the region but are generally too small to cause damage.

PENSACOLA, Fla. – This morning residents and tourists in Pensacola Beach awoke to the day they long feared.

The high tide, plus southeast winds overnight, brought globs of oil onto the pristine white sand beaches here. The oil is now fouling those beaches for as one official said, “as far as the eye can see.”

…NewsHour and only every OTHER damn major newscast from coast to effin’ coast AND world wide, thank you very much. AND the only folks on those nasty beaches they showed ~ besides the fat lady in the Hawaiian shirt crying ~ were BP people lazily sliding globs into Hefty bags. I mean, there’s only so mcuh sh*t you can shovel when MILES of beach are stretching away from the little group of twelve of you. What’s the rush, right? Break in ten minutes!!!

[Page 3/22]…In the Executive Summary to the Report, the Secretary recommends “a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs.” He also recommends
“an immediate halt to drilling operations on the 33 permitted wells, not including relief wells currently being drilled by BP, that are currently being drilled using floating rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.” Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness, the Summary also states that “the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the
National Academy of Engineering.” As the plaintiffs, and the experts themselves, pointedly observe, this statement was misleading. The experts charge it was a “misrepresentation.”
It was factually incorrect. Although the experts agreed with the safety recommendations contained in the body of the main Report, five of the National Academy experts and three of the other experts have publicly stated that they “do not agree with the six month blanket moratorium” on floating drilling. They envisioned a more limited kind of moratorium, but a blanket moratorium was added after their final review, they complain, and was never agreed to by them.

A factor that might cause some apprehension about the probity of the process that led to the Report.

“Probity” of the process? Probity as in “adherence to the highest principles and ideals/honesty = probity”?
Maybe somebody stretched and manipulated to suit an agenda? (And from the little I’ve read already, Hizzoner shreds “The Secretary”.)